B/4 and Ever After
B/4
Getting certified had become my new habit in mid-life. This wasn’t the worst addiction out there in 2019. There I was, I was an aspiring filmmaker, caught in a bi-costal live-work situation, between Brooklyn and The Bay Area. To me this was the perfect time to get certified in my new expensive hobby, aerial yoga. My habit of earning certifications came with a certain hope to turn hobbies into income streams. By then, my midlife map looked like a zig zag, from PADI Deep diver, to Thai Yoga Massage Practitioner, and soon-to-be Aerial Yoga Instructor—with no pay-off in sight. But hey, I was learning that life, liberty and the pursuit of expensive hobbies can last a lifetime—as long as that person has a paying job and safe place called home, one that can’t be taken away from them.
Enter the plot twist. Part of this story was told recently at the NYS Loft Board public hearing in a downtown Manhattan courthouse. I’ve waited to disclose the details, until I had a less-sad ending. I’ll keep it brief for the shorter attention spans of our modern culture. Here’s what went down: My landlord tried to illegally evict me from the artists loft where I’d been a responsible, rent-paying tenant for nearly twenty years.
New York Landlords are a special breed of greedy, with well-known tactics to boot decent tenants out of leases, in order to raise the rent. I knew this much, but I did not know my landlord was actually Putin. Or that in a matter of days his request to “make a few improvments” to my loft, would turn every corner of my home to rubble—where toxic dust, damaging floods, theft and other forms of violations ensued—just as the world shut down for the pandemic. Sadly, my list of hobby-certifications did not prepare me for the ugly legal battle, or my unending stretch of unemployment, or a world shutdown.
I remember my breakdown, slouching over a pile of broken records and boxes of molded photos in my destroyed living room—crying. How did my card-carrying-cool zig-zag path end with this? As an artist, a band leader, a storyteller and a B-sider—this shitty pile covered in toxic dust was now my life to clean up. I blinked tears away and looked up at the ceiling. Ten feet above me, the pipes dripped a brownish yuck that fell to the floor and splattered by my feet. I stared up again, squinting as I calculated the distance of the next drop about to fall. I could have been fixated on this new leak, but instead I blinked hard and my brain jumped to a new thought, “Look how high that pipe is!” and I smiled wide “ Wait.” I said to the silence, “I have high ceilings!”
I said it again, “ I have high ceilings!” I felt instantly giddy as my revelation bubbled to the surface, “I can turn all of this… (see photo above) into an actual aerial studio.” I sat up straight, my eyes fixed on those ten foot ceilings and how I could hang soothing, colorful aerial silks in my old living room.
I let that image burn into my pupils. Next, I fought my Putin-esque Landlord…and next, I won. Two years later, I’ve opened Aerapy Method, the first holistic aerial movement salon of its kind in Dumbo Brooklyn. With lo fi chill tunes by Air, Mazzy Star and Zero 7, I always set the mood to what I believe the world needs now: 100% radical calm & resilience.
The Ever After
This is my very fulfilling life on the B/side. Designing rad set lists for my aerial classes is now my job. Getting certified in new aerial techniques in Costa Rica is also my job, as is helping people find relief and freedom by swinging through space—this is my dream. I didn’t have a 5 year plan or career strategy to get here. And I didn’t get here with a straight line; I got here from a real crisis, a bumpy zig and a rocky zag. I got here because I got certified in everything.
In precisely 2 years.
